Lahat ng Kabanata ng HIS PLUS SIZE BAD GIRL: Kabanata 81 - Kabanata 90

Chapter 82 Mateo’s POV “No, I am not going to accept that, Layla, not like this, and not while you are crying with your knees pulled against your chest in the middle of my bed,” I said, and I heard how hard the words came out and I made no attempt to soften them. She flinched, and I felt it in my own chest. I had not meant to speak to her that way, but her phone was lying face down on the nightstand with the light of the message still leaking around its edges, and I could not stop looking at it, because that message had arrived at the exact moment I had stopped thinking about anything except the woman beside me. I got off the bed, picked my trousers up from the floor, and put them on, because I would not have this conversation without clothes on and I did not trust myself to stay a reasonable distance from her. My hands were not entirely steady on the zip. She sat with the sheet drawn up under her chin and her eyes red, and she watched me dress without saying anything, an

Chapter 84 I could manage the days. I could stand in the lift next to him and keep my eyes on the display, and I could sit through a call with the Singapore office and take notes in my own handwriting without noticing that my hand was trembling. But when I lay down in my own bed in the dark, in the room that he had never once entered through the front door, my body came alive in a way that I could not control, and I had no work to put in front of it. The first night I turned over onto my stomach and pushed my face into the pillow and counted to a hundred, and then I did it again. The second night I got up and stood at the window for an hour. By the fifth night I had stopped trying to distract myself, and I lay on my back with my eyes open and let it all come, the whole slow parade of it. I remembered the first night he had undressed me in the light. I had been so afraid, with my arms crossed over my stomach and my back against his bedroom wall, and he had unfastened my dress a

Chapter 86 Layla’s POV “I appreciate the offer more than I can say, Mr. Cole, but I cannot give you an answer tonight, because I would be accepting it for the wrong reasons, and I would like to be certain of my reasons before I put my name to anything,” I said, laying my napkin beside my plate and looking at him across the small round table. Adrian Cole smiled and nodded slowly, as though he had expected exactly that reply and thought better of me for it. He was about fifty, broad in the shoulders, with grey coming in at his temples and a pair of rimless glasses that he took off whenever he wanted to emphasise a point, and he had been a guest of Mrs. Whitfield at the harbour hotel dinner, where he had found me at the bar afterwards and said that he wished he had been seated near enough to listen to the whole of my explanation of the Hartmann contract. He was a managing partner at Calloway and Reed, a commercial advisory firm with offices in three cities, and he had sent me a shor

Chapter 88 Layla’s POV “The indemnity clause cannot stop at direct losses, because their lawyers will use the word consequential to reopen the whole penalty section, so it has to be defined here before we move on to the schedule,” I said, without lifting my eyes from the page I was marking. Mateo did not answer at once. He sat beside me at the long oak table in the corner of his office, where he held his smaller meetings, with a printed copy of the contract open between us and his sleeves rolled to the elbow. I could hear him breathing. It was ten minutes past eight on a Wednesday evening, and the floor outside had been empty since seven except for the cleaners, who worked their way along the corridor with a trolley and left each door exactly as they found it. At six o’clock Marcus had come out of this office with a face the colour of paper. The Hartmann lawyers had moved the signing from Friday to nine o’clock the following morning, and they had written that if the fi

Chapter 90 Layla’s POV “Audrey told me that you asked her for my attendance records this morning, Wyatt, so I would like you to tell me why, and I would like you to do it before I decide what to do about it,” I said, closing his office door behind me and standing with my back against it. He did not look up at once. He was seated at his desk with a printed layout in front of him and a pen in his hand, and he finished writing a line in the margin before he set the pen down and leaned back in his chair. It was twenty past eleven on a Thursday, and the Hartmann agreement had been signed the previous morning at nine o’clock exactly, which meant that for the first time in two weeks I had slept for six hours and woken without a knot in my stomach. That had lasted until a quarter to nine, when Audrey had come to my desk with her arms folded and a face that I knew too well. She told me that Wyatt had sent a request to the human resources office for the leave history, the badge ent